


Into the Dark

by Heart_Seoul_Soshi



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: F/F, Malvie main, Minor Ben/Audrey, Minor Evie/Doug, slowburn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-03-30 23:56:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19038175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heart_Seoul_Soshi/pseuds/Heart_Seoul_Soshi
Summary: The destruction of Auradon is close at hand by the greatest evil the kingdom has ever known, and gone are the fairytale days of good triumphing over the wicked. Ben and the VKs are powerless to stop the looming apocalypse, and this time, light will not be enough to vanquish the dark. This time, to fight the evil......They'll need a Mistress of All Evil.





	1. Not All a Dream

Evie thought she would be safe. Provided the earth didn't split beneath her feet and swallow her alive—which, in retrospect, was foolish of her to so easily dismiss—Evie thought she would be safe.  
  
Outside on the lawn there were no ceilings over her head to crack and collapse, or heavy bookshelves to fall away from the walls and bury her. So when the quaking began on her way back from the Tourney field and everyone else around her went scrambling for the shelter of Auradon Prep, Evie didn't follow. Evie who thought herself smarter and wiser stayed outside where soft grass would be her cushion if she was thrown from her feet and nothing from high above could come crashing down on her. She didn't at all account for the lone oak tree, one of its thick and wizened branches snapping loose under the strain and plummeting right for her head.  
  
"E! Look out!!"  
  
The yank on her arm was sharp and painful, but Evie was grateful to feel it, for it got her out of the way as the gnarled tree branch crashed to the shuddering ground with a terrible thud. The hug she was pulled into was both frightened and relieved, she could feel it in the tightness of the arms around her. She hadn't even known that Doug was nearby, yet there he was, saving her. Her knight in shining armor. She tucked her head down against his chest and they held each other close amongst the earthquake, fighting to stay on their feet.  
  
The screams were like a whirlwind around them, people calling out to each other to move, or stay put, to watch out and be careful. Evie and Doug stayed put, hanging on and riding out the violent tremors. It lasted only seconds, but seconds seemed like eons when it felt as if the ground were moments away from ripping open and becoming your cavernous, inescapable tomb. The panic didn't stop when the earthquake did, even as everything stilled there were shouts and cries of every emotion in the air around them.  
  
"...Are you okay?" Doug asked, looking over Evie.  
  
She nodded fervently, stepping away from Doug and casting her eyes out across the lawn. It was like watching ants scramble after a kick to the anthill, all chaos and confusion and no small bit of terror.  
  
"...That was the fourth one this month. You'd think they'd be used to it by now," Evie muttered darkly.  
  
She didn't mean it, of course. She herself had a racing heartbeat thudding in her chest; earthquakes shaking the grounds of Auradon Prep were something they'd probably  _never_  get used to. It would've been cause enough for alarm if their beloved school was at the center of it all, but no, this plague of unease and panic was spreading its tendrils all throughout the United States of Auradon.  
  
Evie remembered waking up one day and finding no sunrise. Those brilliant bands of orange and pink climbing up through the sky were some of her favorite things, something she never took for granted since leaving the Isle of the Lost and finally being treated to them now that she was in Auradon. But when she woke up that fateful morning and went to her window, for one horrifying moment she thought she really  _was_  back on that dreadful island. The sky was gray, the thick clouds churning and tumultuous in a way that could only remind Evie of a boiling cauldron, bubbling with toxic potion. She had expected a storm to follow, but none ever came, and the next day, and the day after that, the sunrise still was missing.  
  
Even now, as she and Doug watched order fall apart in the aftermath of yet another earthquake, the sky above their heads was grayed and ugly, the weather around them gloomy and not at all Auradon's norm. Agrabah had seen fierce snowstorms over the last month, the waters of Auradon Bay tossed and turned with dangerous waves and the ever-present threat of capsizing the kingdom's ships. Earthquakes rocked from the Southern Isles all the way to Neverland, and with each one the cities on the coast held their collective breath for fear of tsunamis. If Evie paid very close attention she could sometimes even feel it in the air, something like a grim and dark electricity making her hair stand on end and tripping each and every one of the instincts that screamed something was terribly wrong.  
  
Doug could see it in her eyes, the anxiety building. Auradon hadn't been her home for long, but still she loved it fiercely. The thought of anything happening to it was not an easy one to entertain. Evie shivered, and Doug's instinctive reaction was to rub her arms as if to warm her.  
  
"We should find Ben," he suggested.  
  
Evie tore her gaze from the hectic madness at the sound of Doug's words, looking back at him as if coming out of a trance.  
  
"Yeah...yes," she agreed, somewhat distractedly. "...He can't calm everyone down alone."  
  
Hand-in-hand the pair hurried across the lawn, weaving through the maze of people in their way to reach the familiar walls of Auradon Prep.  
  
Ben couldn't calm everyone down alone. A rather poor quality in a king, who everyone looked to for guidance and reassurance in tumultuous times. Poor qualities were synonymous with poor Ben, Ben who was a young and inexperienced ruler faced too soon with one mighty kingdom-wide crisis and just couldn't help but be in over his head. When Evie and her friends were brought over from The Isle at his royal decree and proclamation, he was only a prince, even younger and even more inexperienced. But in the harrowing journey from prince to king the VKs had joined the ranks of his closest friends, and luckily for him, his closest friends were on their way to help.  
  
Evie and Doug found him in the school's foyer, halfway up the staircase and projecting to everyone talking at once below, trying to make his voice heard above the din.  
  
"...Where's your trumpet when we need it?" Evie squeezed Doug's hand as they surveyed the crowd, thinking one sharp note was just what was needed to shut everyone up.  
  
"Hey, hey!!" Ben shouted. "First thing's first, is everyone alright??"  
  
Their lungs were working well enough, Evie thought. All around her were twists and variations of the exact same question— _"What is going on??"_  
  
"I've got this," Evie murmured to Doug, letting go of his hand and marching purposefully up the staircase.  
  
It worked like a charm. Evie took her place at Ben's side and a rippling hush settled over the throng at the mere sight of her.   
  
"Is anyone here hurt?" she called out over the railing.  
  
Both she and Ben were relieved to see heads slowly shaking and lips shyly mouthing "no".  
  
"...Good. That's good," Evie said. "Everyone listen. We're all scared by these earthquakes and the other strange things happening in Auradon, but Ben and Fairy Godmother are working day and night to figure out the cause of all of this. So far no one's been hurt and the school hasn't been damaged, and that's what we should be focusing on right now."  
  
Doug jogged his way up the stairs too, standing a step down from Evie and taking his turn at damage control.  
  
"These earthquakes are all very minor and very unlikely to cause anyone harm," he firmly said. "If we all remember that then we can all be a little less scared and take this one day at a time until our king has answers for us."  
  
Ben's appreciation and gratefulness was shown in the quick glance he gave to Doug and Evie, his eyes silently shining a hundred times over with a  _"Thank you"._  
  
"...Everyone should go back to their dorm rooms and stay inside, I'm calling off all the after-school sports and activities," he said. "There might be some slight aftershocks and the dorms will be the safest places for you. This building has been standing proudly for over a century and it's not going anywhere anytime soon."  
  
Ben flashed an easygoing smile to the students below, and they slowly dismissed themselves with murmurs and low chatter to follow Ben's advice. Their faces made it clear they were far from reassured, just really rather dazed, but as long as the blind panic was gone from their expressions, Ben and his friends were happy. But that easygoing smile of his was obviously forced, disappearing in an instant the moment the three of them were alone in the foyer.  
  
"These earthquakes are not minor, Doug," he flatly said.  
  
Doug knew his science. He was well-aware of that fact.  
  
"Sometimes a lie is better than the truth," he sighed and shrugged.  
  
"He didn't learn that from me," Evie quickly denied.  
  
Ben managed a tiny chuckle, but still his somber mood weighed down his shoulders and the set of his face.  
  
"Jay and Carlos?" he wondered, lifting his eyes to meet Evie's.  
  
"Tourney practice. They would've gone underground to the locker room. I was on my way back from the field when the shaking started," she dutifully answered.  
  
"Will you have them meet us?" Ben asked. "My office, fifteen minutes."  
  
Evie frowned.  
  
"Yeah, of course, but why—?"  
  
"Just..." Ben raised a hand to cut her off, a gesture he'd been learning as king. "...I need you all there. I'm going to find Audrey. Fifteen minutes."  
  
He locked eyes first with Evie, then with Doug, telling them both without a word to not be late, before he started down the staircase and off in search of his girlfriend. Doug and Evie exchanged a single glance, one that spoke all for itself.  
  
"...That doesn't sound good," Doug very obviously noted.  
  
"No, it doesn't."  
  
There went Evie's heartbeat again, flushing an uncomfortable heat to her cheeks as she started to assume the worse. Doug took a deep breath, briefly at a loss for words.  
  
"Just because it's bad, doesn't mean it'll stay bad," he tried to rationalize for both Evie's sake and his own. "Fairy Godmother's magic can do a lot, but she needs to know what she's up against first."  
  
"Right...right," Evie absentmindedly nodded. "If she just goes waving her wand around all willy-nilly she could make things so much worse. Everything will be okay as soon as we know what we're dealing with."  
  
Doug inadvertently mimicked Ben and forced a little smile, tucking his hand under Evie's chin and lifting her troubled eyes up from the ground.  
  
"You'll have your sunrises back soon, E," he promised.   
  
Evie couldn't help but smile too.  
  
"I'd like that. So much. If I could just wake up and see  _one_  again I'd feel a lot better."  
  
Doug wished he were a prince. A strong and powerful hero on a legendary quest to bring Evie's sunrises back to her. Oh, how he wished.  
  
"Come on. Let's go get Jay and Carlos," he said.  
  
Evie, meanwhile, wished they didn't have to. For she knew when they all gathered in Ben's office nothing good would come from their meeting. She was prepared for the worst, and even if the truth was far from it, it wouldn't dull the pounding ache in her chest. That ugly static was in the air again, the sense of something lurking and looming. Evie didn't want to be dramatic and use the phrase "impending doom", but, well, nothing else was as accurate a description.  
  
Fifteen minutes zipped past in the blink of an eye, and far too soon for her liking Evie found herself in one of the plush leather chairs of Ben's office. Doug perched on the arm of it, never straying too far from Evie and watching as Audrey sat daintily in the matching chair next to them. Jay and Carlos were too wired to sit, the both of them pacing and shuffling at first before ending up standing behind Audrey's chair like two resolute bodyguards. Bodyguards with anxiously tapping feet, that is. Ben kept up a bit of a pace himself, back and forth in front of his picture window as everyone else settled in.  
  
He seemed so lost in thought, with his brow furrowed and creased, no one really wanted to bother him and snap him out of it. No one except for Audrey, who at the moment was not a patient princess and couldn't take just sitting in silence.  
  
"What is going  _on?_  Why are we here?" she tensely questioned.  
  
Leave it to her to break the ice with a sledgehammer, but with the menial task of it out of the way, Jay was free to dive right in.  
  
"Honestly, Ben. This is about all the crazy weather, right? We're either in the clear or all doomed to die, but just tell us already so we can get it over with."  
  
Carlos turned pale, as snow white as his hair. The words "doomed to die" weren't doing Evie any favors either, but she had Doug there to put a comforting hand on her shoulder.  
  
Ben shook his head and took a seat at his desk, his demeanor even more grim now than it was when he left the foyer.  
  
"...I don't know what to tell you guys. I mean, yeah, there's news, which is more than I can say for the last month or so, but it still feels like we're stuck at square one."  
  
"...Well, what's the news?" Carlos prodded.  
  
Their king rarely needed time to gather his thoughts. Inexperienced, yes, but always knowing what to say and when to say it. The long pause as he mentally sorted things out unnerved everyone in the room.  
  
"We've only felt four of them here at Auradon Prep, but the rest of the kingdom is being hit with these earthquakes too. Cinderellasburg, Auradon City; there was even a point where Camelot was getting them  _everyday."_  
  
Evie and her friends nodded. This, they already knew.  
  
"And I know there's more we're dealing with, there's the storms at sea, the blizzards, the thunderclouds in the sky, but something told me to focus first on all the earthquakes."  
  
Ben leaned forward in his desk and clasped his hands together, looking very regal, very intense.  
  
"Fairy Godmother has been traveling through Auradon looking for mystical causes, but I  _do_ have a court of scientists...and they've traced the earthquakes back to Bald Mountain."  
  
Evie had to gasp, for an invisible fist had just punched her square in the chest and painfully knocked the wind out of her.  
  
The worst. She had assumed the worst, and here it was.  
  
"Bald Mountain is a volcano!!" she said in horror, almost leaping from her seat.  
  
"An  _extinct_ volcano," Doug hurriedly corrected, hands ready to grab Evie and sit her back down should she indeed make a frightened jump to her feet.  
  
"Doug is right," Ben saw the fear flickering to life in everyone else's eyes too and was much better at calming down his close-knit group of friends than half the school panicking en masse. "I worried the volcano was coming to life too, but that isn't the case. If it was about to erupt, the quaking would be in and around the mountain, but somehow...somehow the earthquakes are coming  _from_  the mountain, like it's some kind of beacon sending them out across Auradon. Evie, I have a team of scientists studying this as we speak, I promise you it's not going to erupt."  
  
"But something weird is still going on, right?" Jay asked.  
  
Ben could only nod.  
  
"Something weird is definitely going on."  
  
"Bennyboo, this doesn't help anything," the irritation in Audrey's words was just how her own fear showed itself. "We're still stuck here with snowstorms in Agrabah and heat waves in Arendelle!"  
  
"I know it doesn't help, but it's all I have," Ben tensely told her. "Like I said, it feels like we're still at square one, but I wanted you guys to know first. Bald Mountain is the epicenter. I have to say  _something_  to the press about all of this before Auradon hits mass hysteria and starts rioting in the streets, you know."  
  
And just his luck, that was all he had to say to the press. Yes, there was still a lot more research to be done, and maybe he'd have a better answer for all of the kingdom's turmoil soon, but the people of Auradon wouldn't settle for "soon".  The people of Auradon wanted  _now._  
  
Evie hadn't recovered from her little apocalypse scare, not even with Doug rubbing soothing circles around her back, but perhaps it was exactly what she needed. The nerves weren't just making her heart race, they were making her mind race too. And right now her mind was racing backwards, back in time to a dim memory that was slowly but surely reminding her this wasn't exactly the first time Auradon had been flipped on its head.  
  
"...Hey, guys?"  
  
This time she did get to her feet, not in fear, but in doing what she did best and commanding attention.  
  
"There were storms and earthquakes for a little while after Ben's coronation, remember?" she began.  
  
"Those were nowhere near as bad as this," Carlos told her.  
  
"But the point is that it happened," Evie argued. "It happened because twenty years ago when the barrier was cast over the Isle of the Lost it kept magic away from the villains by forcing it all underground. And when the Mistress of All Evil broke through the barrier during the coronation it was like bursting a seal, and the release of all that magic affected us here in Auradon."  
  
They all understood what Evie was driving at, even Audrey, who admittedly could rarely be bothered to pay attention whenever Evie started talking.  
  
"You think what's happening now  _is_  mystical in nature, just like it was the last time," Ben reiterated, nestling back in his chair and processing. "But after she escaped from The Isle I had her put in her own special prison, there's no way she could've escaped this time."  
  
"It's still worth looking into," Jay shrugged.  
  
"And we can look into it for you," Doug offered. "You're the king, people need to see you out there when things get bad. You handle the PR and we'll handle the research."  
  
Ben paused to meet the eyes of each one of them.  
  
"I can't ask you guys to do that," he said.  
  
"We're your friends. You're not asking us,  _we're_  telling  _you,"_  Evie crossed her arms, her stance firm and unwavering. "People are scared, Ben. And that could wind up causing a lot more damage than any storm or any earthquake. You need to hold a press conference, tell the people of Auradon what you've found out—even if it doesn't seem like much—and then you and Audrey should spend this weekend touring the kingdom, visiting all the hard-hit places."  
  
Doug nodded in complete agreement. After a moment, Carlos and Jay did the same.  
  
"We, meanwhile, will spend the weekend researching on History Island. If there's anything mystical about Bald Mountain, we'll find out about it there," Evie went on.  
  
"That's a five hour drive," Jay mused. "We'll have to get up early."  
  
"Then we'll get up early. Ben gave us Villain Kids the chance to make Auradon our new home, and now that home is in trouble. We owe it to him and to ourselves to help protect it."  
  
"Very patriotic," Audrey muttered, not quite in the mood for dramatics.  
  
Evie ignored the princess, not in the mood for  _her_  either.  
  
"Well hey, if mass hysteria does break out, it's not like we're strangers to rioting in the streets," Jay tried to lighten the mood with a troublemaking smirk. "It's been a while since I've had a good looting."  
  
"Let's try to keep it that way, huh?" Ben chuckled.  
  
"Evie is right, Bennyboo," Audrey eventually admitted with a grudging sigh. "People feel much better in a crisis when they see their leader out there with them. Royalty 101."  
  
"I thought Royalty 101 was 'always accessorize'?" Carlos teased her.  
  
"That's Royalty 102."  
  
They'd succeeded in cheering each other up, if only in the slightest, and they were all grateful to one another for it. Ben conceded to the plan without much of a fight, much of an argument.  
  
"I'll have Lumiere arrange my schedule, then."  
  
"Pretty sure Evie already did that for you," Jay winked.  
  
Evie wore a proud little smile, settling back down in her chair where Doug leaned over to playfully bump her shoulder.  
  
"Thank you for telling us, Ben," she said.  
  
"Thank you for always being here to help me. You're not a royal advisor but still you're the best council I have, Evie."  
  
Audrey's flawless features were marred for a moment by a hideous scowl in Evie's direction. Nobody noticed, and Jay circled around Audrey's chair to make his way over to the desk, looming behind Ben and roughly clapping a hand to his back.  
  
"So, if we're field-tripping to History Island this weekend, you're gonna lend us a car, yeah?" Jay's eyes twinkled. Excitedly or wickedly, it was impossible to tell.  
  
"You can't have the limo," Ben put his foot down right off the bat.  
  
Jay may have pouted a little bit, but if it didn't get him his way as a little kid, it certainly didn't get him his way now.  
  
Doug and Evie were the last ones to leave Ben's office when he called their unofficial little meeting to a close, and Doug watched her carefully the entire leisurely walk down the hall.  
  
"...You okay?" he wondered.  
  
"I will be, once we get this whole mess straightened out," Evie sighed deeply and reached a hand up to push the hair back from where it had fallen into her face.   
  
"We'll find what we're looking for in the archives on History Island," Doug sounded very sure of himself for someone who was the farthest thing from it.  
  
"...Yeah. We have to. We don't have any other choice. Look, Doug, I think I'm just going to head back to my dorm for the evening."  
  
Evie drew to a stop and turned towards Doug, an apologetic expression painting her features.  
  
"You're not even going to come down to dinner? Do you want me to bring you something?" he asked.  
  
"That's very sweet of you, but no thank you. I don't have much of an appetite right now."  
  
Doug smiled the dopey smile passed down to him from his father.  
  
"Let me know if you change your mind. I'm here if you need me."  
  
"I know you are, Doug."   
  
Evie couldn't leave to head for her dorm room without giving him a big hug. She needed it for comfort.   
  
"...I know you are."

* * *

Evie could see her breath in the air come Saturday morning, as if the miserably invasive mood that had settled over Auradon Prep wasn't miserable enough. It was unbelievably early, not even six yet, but still this was a time of year where Evie normally could've spent an afternoon basking in the sun on the campus lawn, homework forgotten in the notebooks beside her and wonderful rays of sunlight shining down soothingly on her skin. Instead she was in a parka with the zipper pulled up as far as it would go, one gloved hand deep in a pocket and the other one holding up her phone flashlight to navigate the same campus lawn she should've been sunbathing on later that day if the world hadn't been turned upside down.  
  
Early morning dark always felt different to Evie than any other kind of darkness. It seemed heavy and pervasive, almost otherworldly, and that dark was pressing in all around her as she made her way to the front of the school. If she'd known it was going to be  _this_  cold she wouldn't have taken the shortcut through the lawn, she would've stayed inside the building and gladly gone the long way around. She was shivering by the time she could put her phone away and let the garden lights in the decorative front hedges illuminate the world for her, but the sight of the boys waiting by one of the school cars promised her a warm cushioned interior and a chance to nap on a five hour journey.  
  
"Where's Doug?" Jay questioned, forgoing a "good morning" because the morning certainly in no way qualified as good.  
  
"You know what they say—'And the band played on'. The marching band director organized a show in the city, sort of a morale-boosting thing. They left last night."  
  
"Ben would be proud," Jay muttered, his lips barely moving so no one would hear his chattering teeth.  
  
Carlos opened the passenger side door and stooped over to duck inside the car for a second, popping back out with a thermos in hand.  
  
"I made us coffee," he tiredly said, handing Evie hers.  
  
"...You are a  _saint,"_  Evie breathed a mighty sigh of relief, her horrible morning picking up just the slightest.  
  
"Saint De Vil, that's him, can we just get this show on the road?" the cold made Jay testy, and he didn't even wait for any sort of a response before he rounded the hood of the car to slip into the driver's seat.  
  
Truth be told, Evie wasn't looking forward to five hours alone in a backseat, even if she  _did_  intend to spend the majority of those hours fast asleep. She had Carlos and Jay, her very best friends, but they would be up in the front seats bickering over directions while Evie would be sitting by herself and wishing she had someone to lay her head on. She knew that this was no fun-filled road trip, that this was business and business alone, but still she'd spent the week looking forward to it the same way she always looked forward to being together with all of her friends.  
  
Now her sour mood was just deflating faster than the sips of her coffee could build it back up.  
  
History Island was exactly what it sounded like, an island off the coast of the southeastern shores whose only structure was a massive library filled with every book, tome, and scroll about Auradon imaginable. Bald Mountain was the most ancient and mysterious place in the land, with its sheer and jagged cliffs, the billowing clouds covering its face. Nearly impossible to climb, and even more impossible to reach its summit, the majority of what was known about the mountain had been lost to time, left alive only in the archives the Villain Kids were en route to. Science told them that something was brewing behind those clouds and the endless banks of fog, but science couldn't tell them what. That was up to them now, and although they hadn't verbally agreed to it, the three of them all knew they wouldn't be leaving that island without getting some answers.  
  
Evie only knew the sun was coming up by the time, it wasn't as if she could actually see it. Another gray morning was coming to life outside the frigid window, and soon enough Auradon would be waking up to another day of unknowns. Would more earthquakes hit? Would Agrabah's sands still be buried beneath snow? Would Auradon Prep be standing when the VKs got back, or would a lightning storm churn to life in their wake and burn it to the ground? Evie didn't want to think about it, she just wanted to focus on the task at hand. The road they were on now had sparse forest on either side of them, which would've easily captured Evie's attention if Auradon's bad weather didn't make everything look so gloomy and dull.  
  
They'd only been driving for half an hour and already Jay and Carlos were arguing over directions, just like Evie knew they would. Their phones were showing two different routes to History Island, and even though neither of them had been there before, they both insisted their ways were the right ways.   
  
"Boys, you realize we won't even hit a fork in the road for another two hours, right?" Evie interrupted. "How about you argue then?"  
  
"...Sorry Evie," they mumbled together.  
  
Diffusing a situation never came with all of her mother's princess lessons back on The Isle, that was something Evie had grown into on her own.  
  
"Okay, the library of History Island is  _enormous_ , and it runs on its own. No librarians, no nothing. People come and go as needed, so when we get there the first thing we need to do is find the texts on Bald Mountain," she explained.  
  
Carlos turned around in his seat to be looking at her when they spoke.  
  
"Probably the section on geography, or Auradon topography," he mused. "Or hey, Bald Mountain is a volcano, right? Maybe even geology."  
  
"I've always hated studying," Jay grumbled, adjusting his grip on the steering wheel. "I don't even like doing my research papers for school, and now here we are doing homework for all of Auradon."  
  
"This is our home now," Evie really didn't need to remind him, but she did it anyway. "If something happens here on the mainland we can't just go running back to the Isle of the Lost."  
  
"Not even when The Isle has a magic barrier to keep out all the weird stuff that's happening here?"  
  
_"Jay."_  
  
All that time stuck in a car with miles and miles of now-depressing Auradon countryside was no picnic, but the three of them made the most of it. As Villain Kids from The Isle, they were good at making the most of things. Evie napped. Carlos napped. He later woke up and took over driving for Jay so Jay could nap. They played uneventful games of I Spy and Twenty Questions and blasted the car radio when good songs came on to sing along at the top of their lungs. Maybe Evie's poor mood was just a product of a dismal early morning, for as the day went on she began to remember why exactly she was looking forward to this trip.  
  
By the time they hit the halfway point of Corona, Carlos was in the backseat too, lazily stretched out with his feet in Evie's lap and the games on his phone stuck in front of his face. Jay purposely made a sharp stop at a red light to send an unbuckled Carlos tumbling to the floor, leading to scolding from Evie and roaring laughter from behind the wheel.  
  
Two hours later the coast was finally in sight, and with it, History Island, off in the distance and nestled in the bay. Evie heard thunder rumble threateningly outside the windows, and saw the flashes of light in the roiling clouds out at sea.  
  
"Bad day to be a pirate..." Jay said under his breath, gazing at the storm out of his driver's side window.  
  
"...You guys don't think things will get much worse, do you?" Carlos fretted, his eyes wide and anxious. "I mean, the earthquakes and the freak weather are bad enough, but what if we get tornados next? Or hurricanes??"  
  
Evie remembered her and Doug helping Ben keep order during Auradon Prep's last earthquake earlier that week. She remembered Doug's _"Sometimes a lie is better than the truth"._  
  
"...No, Carlos. I'm sure that won't happen. It's already been a month, if we were going to get disasters like that we would've gotten them already."  
  
Evie didn't exactly sound or seem the most convincing. But that was okay. Carlos wouldn't have believed her no matter what optimistic thing she said.  
  
Jay's GPS told them they were just fifteen minutes from the bridge that would take them across the dangerous-looking water and onto the island, and the three of them were ready. Ready to begin their search, ready to start digging for information, ready to find out why the world seemed like it was ending around them and what exactly Bald Mountain had to do with it.  
  
Their car was the only one in the parking lot, and they'd made it to History Island in time for a whole afternoon to themselves. Jay was out first, his eyes squeezing shut as he indulged in a mighty stretch, and Carlos and Evie were next, closing their doors behind them before looking up nervously at the very dark sky when more thunder rumbled with a long and drawn-out growl.  
  
"Check this place  _out."_  
  
Jay's words brought the attention of the other two back down to earth, the the beautiful structure of the library in front of them. It was indeed massive, one single yet gigantic building standing nobly like a cathedral with its towering spires and rose windows.  
  
"Wow...it's gorgeous," Evie marveled.  
  
"Commissioned by Queen Belle, right?" Carlos added. "I can definitely see that."   
  
The thunder suddenly went from an ominous grumble to an earsplitting crack, striking the air like a titanic whip and making the three friends leap like frightened rabbits.  
  
"Hey, let's get inside," Jay urgently said, watching the clouds like a hawk and shoving Evie and Carlos ahead of him in the direction of the entrance.  
  
There were no arguments from the two, and they all made it into the vast library foyer just as a tremendous downpour began outside.  
  
If Evie was back when Auradon still made sense, she would've adored a day like this with all her heart. Sitting in front of the warmth of her dorm room fireplace, a tower of books beside her and a mug of coffee in her hand while the rain beat down heavily on the windows.  _That_  was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. All Evie had now was the tower of books, dry and dull pages lecturing to her about practically everything besides what she needed to know.  
  
A long and probably centuries-old wooden table in the library's main study was where the VKs had set up base, picking books off the almost endless columns of shelves in fours and fives to take back with them and pore through. There was no way they could actually sit and read through the seas of words both printed and handwritten, but they knew how to properly skim. And silence hung among the three of them as flips of pages and the unrolling of scrolls were the only sounds echoing up to the ribbed vault ceiling in between frustrated sighs.  
  
Carlos slapped a book down forcefully on its spine, caring not how old it might be as he freed his hands to bury his face into them with a groan. The boys sat across from Evie at the table, and she peeked up over the top of her own book with a sympathetic frown.  
  
"No luck over there either, huh?" she guessed.  
  
"My brain hurts," Jay let out a long exhale and leaned back in his chair. He'd never done so much reading in his life.  
  
In a library that stretched on forever in all directions it took them long enough just to  _find_ the books they needed, but now that the VKs had them they were proving to be very little help at all. After almost three hours on History Island the Villain Kids could tell you Bald Mountain's elevation, its geographic coordinates, the ins and outs of its subalpine climate and even its average annual precipitation, but still they could not tell you why the mysterious peak had suddenly become an earthquake epicenter.  
  
"There's nothing mystical about Bald Mountain," Carlos said bitterly, lowering his hands and rather miffed at all the numbers and factoids cramming the limited space in his head.  
  
"Nothing that we've found  _yet,"_  Evie corrected him. "Auradon may have retired its magic and tried to forget it ever existed, but if we're going to find the secret of Bald Mountain then we're going to find it here. That's what this place was built for, to tell the  _whole_  story of Auradon. The good, the bad, and the magic. We just have to keep looking."  
  
"Check the section on magic," Jay elbowed Carlos, letting his eyes fall shut as if he meant to fall asleep.  
  
Carlos, on the other hand, rolled his eyes.  
  
"There's like a dozen of those. That doesn't exactly narrow it down," he argued against Jay's offhanded comment before ignoring it completely. "Evie, we can't read through this entire library."  
  
"Then we'll just have to hope that luck is on our side. A little faith, trust, and pixie dust wouldn't hurt either."  
  
Carlos let loose a laugh, albeit a dark one, and stood up from his chair.  
  
"I'm gonna go get another stack," he grudgingly announced.  
  
Faith, trust, and pixie dust were hard things to hold on to when a dismal thunderstorm was raging around you and every minute just ticked time closer to yet another earthquake.  
  
The bookshelves towered like trees, a venerable forest of pages and long, winding paragraphs. If Carlos were a more claustrophobic person he would've hated this place very much, but alas, his years growing up in his mother's closet didn't screw him up too badly in that respect, and he could take the maze of shelves looming around him in stride.  
  
But honestly, he was exhausted, and even though he said he was going to retrieve another stack of books to study, he wasn't opposed to taking his sweet time doing it. Jay was practically snoring back at their table, why shouldn't Carlos get a chance to stretch his legs and rest his weary mind?  
  
Maze-like truly was the word for the library's layout, because after just a few short twists and turns Carlos was in nothing remotely close to familiar territory. His only clue that he was moving deeper into the library was the way that the shelves he passed began to fill more and more with scrolls and loose pieces of parchment, literature of a bygone era. He'd grabbed a couple scrolls earlier in the afternoon and was admittedly intrigued by them; he liked the feel of the worn paper in his hands, the unique crinkling of it as it was unrolled and the way the words dipped under his fingertips from the pressure of the pen that wrote them ages ago.  
  
He was close to the windows now, and a bright bolt of lightning startled him even before the booming thunder followed. He shook it off and started wandering again, noting how the bookcases got more ornate and decorative than the ones closer to the center of the library. Soon enough the books disappeared entirely from the shelves and now there was nothing but towers of scrolls all around Carlos. Some with paper of white, some yellowed with age, some wrinkled and poorly rolled but all of them with a fine layer of dust.  
  
"Cool," Carlos breathed.  
  
The library ladder was nearby, and he rolled it over. Wheeling it into place he climbed up a few steps and perched there, hooking his arm through a rung and pulling out an arbitrary scroll. It was nothing he could read when he opened it up, an alphabet of straight lines and angles with  _some_  of the symbols resembling familiar English letters, but nothing more.  
  
"Curiouser and curiouser..." he grinned to himself.  
  
Auradon as a united kingdom was only twenty years old, but the lands that made it up went back centuries.  _That_  was the history of History Island, archaic texts and medieval culture that were fascinating Carlos as he went from one scroll to another. In the back of his mind he knew he should be returning to Jay and Evie, but looking at all the different languages penned onto the various scrolls was so much more interesting. Carlos wondered what they said, who wrote them, if there was anyone left in Auradon who still knew how to read them.   
  
A piece of parchment fell and fluttered to the floor when he slipped the next scroll loose, as if pushed to the very back of the shelf. Carlos frowned, putting the scroll away to slide down the ladder and retrieve what he'd dropped. Fallen facedown, there was no writing on the back of the wrinkled parchment, and Carlos crouched down to flip it over and take a look.  
  
Lightning struck and the thunder was immediate, the walls of the library trembling with the sound of it as Carlos went very, very cold.   
  
"...Oh  _no."_

* * *

The wait was agonizing.  
  
Ben could cut his trip around the kingdom short, but he couldn't just poof himself back to Auradon Prep, and every minute of every hour his friends waited for him to return was a minute too long. Thank goodness Evie didn't bite her beautiful nails, for they'd be torn down to nubs by now if she did.  
  
Sunday morning was when they finally got the text in a group chat that Ben was just fifteen minutes away from the campus, and Evie, Carlos, and Jay headed for his office to wait for him as one. They found the door unlocked, and Evie went right in, pacing Ben's window the way Ben himself often did.  
  
"...Evie, please don't pace," Carlos softly said. He didn't like to see her do it because he knew it meant her nerves were on fire.  
  
Yet he himself couldn't even sit still, wistfully eyeing Ben's office chairs but choosing to stand instead, hands shoved in his pants pockets. Jay's anxiousness showed in the way his eyes darted all over, as if the king's office wasn't the safest place in Auradon Prep and enemies would be dropping from the ceiling at any moment. Their heads whipped right around when the door opened and Ben came in, fresh from the royal limousine and not even stopping to take the crown from his head.  
  
"Hey, everyone..." he greeted, slowly closing the door behind him and never taking his eyes off of his friends.  
  
The boys only responded with curt nods.  
  
"Hey," Evie said, turning her body towards Ben and folding her arms tight across her chest. "Where's Audrey?"  
  
"Her room. She's not exactly...well, happy about being kept out of the loop, but I don't want to worry her until I see for myself."  
  
"You told her we found something on History Island?" Jay wondered.  
  
"I didn't tell her why we were coming back early at all."  
  
"Bet  _that_  was a fun car ride."  
  
"Jay," Evie went over and scoldingly swatted at him.  
  
Ben studied the mixture of emotions playing out on everyone's faces. None of them good.  
  
"...So. There's really no point in dragging this out, I suppose. You've all waited long enough to tell me. What did you find on History Island?"  
  
Carlos strode right over to Ben's desk, reaching into the interior pocket of his black and white blazer and pulling out the piece of parchment he'd taken from the library. It was folded up to fit—a few more creases wouldn't hurt the badly worn paper—and looking Ben dead in the eye Carlos unfolded the parchment to lay it down on the king's desk.  
  
"...We found this."  
  
Ben's jaw dropped. A crass gesture unbecoming of a royal, but he just couldn't help it.  
  
_"...What_  is  _that??"_  he demanded.  
  
Jay cleared his throat, coming up close beside Ben and leaning in to literally point it out for him.  
  
"Well,  _that_  is Bald Mountain, and  _this_..." he trailed off and let his finger fall, for he really didn't have an answer.  
  
None of them had an answer when Carlos came running for them yesterday, finding the parchment lost among some scrolls in History Island's library and sprinting back to Jay and Evie. He carried with him what looked like an illustration fit for one of their school textbooks, but hand-done in ink so old that the deep black had faded to muted gray. Bald Mountain was obvious enough, with its harsh drops and jagged fang-like points expertly captured in sharp lines and angles. Yes, Bald Mountain was made clear enough in the illustration.  
  
But no one could explain the monstrous beast perched menacingly on top of it.  
  
A fiend bathed in shadows as big as the mountain peak itself, glowing white eyes glaring from a horned head with wings twice the monster's size climbing into a darkened sky not unlike the one now blanketing Auradon. It's evil eyes were cast down the mountain, piercing whatever populace lay below with nothing but pure malice twisting a grotesque face.  
  
"...It wasn't anywhere near any of the sections on Bald Mountain," Evie shivered just looking at the drawing, feeling as if those eyes could stare right through her.  
  
"I found it way in the back of the library. Stuffed behind some scrolls written in a bunch of old languages," Carlos said, glancing down at his feet as if ashamed to be the one to make the terrifying discovery.  
  
"Ben, you don't think that..." Evie took a deep breath, hugging herself like she was trying to keep warm. "...You don't really think there's a  _monster_  on top of Bald Mountain, do you?"  
  
There was a heavy, deadened silence where no one could say anything to her.  
  
"I mean, I know it sounds silly," Evie went on, talking fast now. "I know that, I really do, but there's earthquakes coming from the mountain, all these strange things happening around Auradon, and—"  
  
Ben held up a hand to interrupt and then rested it on Evie's shoulder, hearing the stress in her rising tone.  
  
"I don't know, Evie," he gravely shook his head. "I don't know what this thing is. I don't know if it's real, or fake, or nothing more than a page from some old book of scary stories...I have no idea what this could be. But whatever it is, it's big. And it looks dark...I think if we're going to stand any chance of figuring this out now, we need an expert on dark."  
  
The brows of Carlos and Jay furrowed in confusion at the same time, not catching his drift. Evie, however, caught it right away, jumping back from Ben's comforting hand with a gasp as if jumping back from a hot stove.  
  
_"Ben!"_  she hissed. "Are you joking? You want her help??"  
  
Ben kept a calm demeanor in the face of Evie's uncharacteristically frazzled one.  
  
"We may very well  _need_  her help, Evie. Magic nowadays is practically nonexistent in Auradon. I don't know anything about it, you don't know anything about it; Fairy Godmother is the only one who has any idea what she's doing, but not when it comes to dark magic. And this creature is obviously dark, and obviously evil. If it's real, and threatening Auradon, are any of us here going to be able to stop it?"  
  
"She is the worst. Villain. In the land," Evie seriously stressed her words, each one of them heavy with emphasis.  
  
Now that Carlos and Jay had figured out the subject at hand, they had vocal disagreements to utter as well.  
  
"What makes you think the Mistress of All Evil would  _ever_  help us?" Jay demanded, narrowing his eyes at Ben. "She'd probably grab a bucket of popcorn and watch as this thing eats all of Auradon."  
  
"B-Ben, even the villains are afraid of her," Carlos said, his point made clear with his trembling voice. "The three of us, we wouldn't even walk past her castle on the way to school."  
  
"Yeah, because who knew when she'd come running out to beat a kid with her scepter..." Jay grumbled, only partially kidding.  
  
"There'd be no controlling her," Evie added, standing sternly in front of Ben. "She broke out of The Isle and had to be put in a brand new prison here and honestly it's only a matter of time before she breaks out of  _that_  one too."  
  
Ben had to move around his desk and take a seat in his chair, finally taking off the crown that weighed so mightily on his head and running a hand through his hair.  
  
"I don't like this idea any more than you do. Believe me," he said first and foremost. "But I am the king of Auradon. To protect his country and the people in it, a king sometimes has to make the hard choices. This is one of them, I know that. Look, the least I can do is see her and ask if she knows what this drawing depicts."  
  
Evie, Carlos, and Jay spoke volumes to each other with mere stares alone. Involving the Mistress of All Evil was the last thing they ever expected to come from Ben's mouth, and they didn't even like discussing it, let alone think about actually doing it. But Ben had a point, and the Villain Kids had nothing else. The least they could do was ask. Gather their courage to face the infamous villain from the other side of her prison cell and ask one simple question— _"What is this?"_  Maybe Ben was right, and such a monster didn't even exist. Maybe Carlos had only stumbled upon a torn page from a storybook, written and illustrated to entertain a long-ago land where tv wouldn't exist for another five hundred years.  
  
"...If you're going to see her, you're not going alone," Evie said to Ben, breaking the silence. "You realize that, right?"  
  
The boys nodded their solidarity. Ben of course wanted to protest, to keep them out of it, but he knew his best friends and knew that there wasn't a force in the kingdom that could stop them from following him to the ends of the earth.  
  
"...Okay. We all go. But as long as we're the only four who know about this, let's keep it that way for now. We don't get Audrey or Doug or anyone else involved until we have more answers. Alright?"  
  
"Alright," the VKs murmured together.  
  
Ben reached for his crown, and fitted it once more on top of his head.  
  
"Then it looks like we're taking another little trip."

* * *

Evie in particular did not like it down here. The network of tunnels leading to the underground cave converted into the villainess's prison reminded Evie far too much of her mother's vivid descriptions of the lair beneath her old castle, where she brewed up a deadly poison for Snow White and cackled as a hag at the skeletons laying lifeless in their cages. As gloomy a prison as the Isle of the Lost was, this one seemed remarkably gloomier, filled only with torchlight lining the rocky walls and the eerily steady drip of water echoing somewhere off in the distance. Evie expected to see skeletons herself, or perhaps a swarm of bats. Either would be very fitting right about now.  
  
Ben had a hard sell up top, convincing the stern watchman to let them go down into the caverns without guards, but Ben knew they stood  _no_  chance of getting the Mistress of All Evil to talk with Auradon muscle lingering behind them. He held a torch himself as he led the way down long flights of stone steps, the sound of their shoes bouncing and tangling with the sound of that unseen water dripping from a ceiling somewhere.  
  
It was worlds more medieval than Carlos was expecting. With his knack for technology and science, when he pictured a prison designed solely for Auradon's ultimate evil, he pictured titanium doors, three feet thick. Keypads and bio-scanners and security cameras at every angle. He didn't at all imagine them coming to a stop in front of a gothic double door like that of a castle's, thick weathered oak and latched with an iron bolt.  
  
"...She's in here," Ben said, turning around to face them. "The magic that keeps her in this cell is a hundred times stronger than the magic that keeps the villains on The Isle, so don't worry."  
  
They still worried. When Ben undid the bolt and pulled the doors open with a creak, they worried even more. Ben had to hold his head up high as their king, yet he too could feel something like a fearful trembling trying to rise up from the center of his chest and make him shiver, make him cower. He could be scared, yes, but he didn't dare show it.  
  
Not when his friends were behind him and he could already feel the eyes peering at him from behind the wrought iron bars.   
  
The bars divided the cavern right down the middle; good on the outside in a warm bubble of torchlight, evil on the inside and lurking in the darkness.  
  
"...Carlos, you have it?" Ben asked.  
  
Suddenly doubting himself, Carlos checked his inside pocket to make sure he still carried the parchment with him.  
  
"Yeah," he nodded, perhaps a little too hard.  
  
Ben led the way further into the cave, Evie and the boys automatically moving out from behind him to gather at his side. They were collectively brave enough to stop right in front of the bars, trying to catch sight of the woman in the shadows. For reasons probably equally safety-related as they were her own personal preference for darkness, there were no torches within the prison cell itself—can't have the villain with a flair for pyromania getting her hands on fire when no one's looking, after all. As it were, she indeed was cloaked by shadow, most likely watching with a calculating gleam in her eyes as the four of them stood and morbidly waited for their first look at her.  
  
"My name is King Benjamin," Ben took a breath and announced. Everyone in the kingdom knew who he was, good and evil alike, but still he thought it only polite to provide introductions. "These are my friends, Jay, Carlos, and Evie. We're only here to talk with you. We  _just_  want to talk."  
  
Seemed she was intrigued, for they all heard the slow shuffle of her steps as she moved within the darkness, coming right up to the bars blocking her from freedom and finally being illuminated by the dancing orange light from the flames of Ben's torch.  
  
_"This_  is the Mistress of All Evil?" Carlos blurted incredulously.  
  
He immediately wished he hadn't asked. At the utterance of his words her grin twisted eerily in the flickering firelight, something wicked and dangerous and absolutely ready to eat Carlos alive.  
  
Oh, he  _really_ wished he hadn't asked.  
  
"...Call me Mal."


	2. And All Was Black

"...I thought she'd be taller," Jay muttered.  
  
The Mistress of Evil sized him up like a predator eyeing prey, which wasn't too farfetched a comparison to their current situation.  
  
"Don't worry beefcake, I know how to cut you down to my size," Mal's sinister smile was chilling in the light from Ben's torch.  
  
Jay gruffly cleared his throat and backed away from the prison cell. But as he stepped away, Evie drew closer, morbid intrigue shining in her eyes. The way most people look at car wrecks, or house fires blazing bright, that was how Evie looked at the villainess behind the bars.  
  
"...So you're really her. The Mistress of All Evil."  
  
"She is me," Mal curtsied, a mocking gesture.  
  
Evie remembered the morning of Ben's coronation. A royal affair to end all royal affairs, and she and her friends were in attendance. The Villain Kids from The Isle, living in an absolute fairytale. They were no longer feared when they stood together in that cathedral, smiling and laughing with their school and kingdom around them. They were friends with the king and many of Auradon Prep's others, standing right up front at Ben's insistence in exquisite suits and a beautiful dress. When they gathered together there the three were done being the daughter of the Evil Queen, son of Jafar, and son of Cruella De Vil.  
  
Finally, like they'd deeply wished to be for so, so long, they were simply Evie, Jay, and Carlos.  
  
Then the cathedral doors were thrown wide with a bang like a shot echoing through the hall. The racing feet of the Auradon guards sounded like a wildebeest stampede as they rushed in to alert their newly-crowned king of the breach in The Isle's barrier, the blast of purple lightning shattering the magic like glass. Panic erupted, and all of a sudden it felt like nothing had changed at all for the trio. Fear and evil still swarmed around their lives like a brewing storm, and one magical fairytale moment was stained forever as the crowd went screaming and Auradon was called to arms.  
  
Mal knew a bad memory when she saw one, chuckling darkly as she watched Evie's inner turmoil unfold from behind the curtain of purple fallen into her eyes.  
  
"Aw, are we not fans of the big bad Mistress of Evil?" Mal faked an upset frown and a pout, curling her fingers around the bars of her cell. "Could've fooled me, coming all the way down here just for a little chit-chat."  
  
Sometimes Carlos's fear manifested itself in the form of humor. Right now was the absolute worst moment for one of those times.  
  
"W-Well, we figured we wouldn't have much luck with a phone call," he joked.  
  
The Mistress of All Evil had emeralds in her eyes, things both of beauty and deadly sharpness as the stare she captured Carlos in just then cut like a knife against his throat.  
  
"Aren't you adorable. Do you want to know what I  _do_  to adorable things?"  
  
Carlos stiffened, shaking his head vigorously back and forth as all the color drained from his face.  
  
Iron bars—though enchanted by magic—seemed to be a poor substitute for protection when they were facing Mal, and Ben itched with the urge to not linger for very long. He had to lead the conversation, and not let it be stolen away by the villainess, for neither his friends nor the kingdom had time to waste.  
  
"We need your help. Auradon may be facing a crisis."  
  
"I love those."  
  
Ben frowned at her, but went on nevertheless.  
  
"There have been terrible things happening to the kingdom lately. Earthquakes, storms, strange weather—"  
  
"Really? Huh. It's hard to notice those kinds of things when you're imprisoned underground in a stone cell with no windows."  
  
Mal left her place at the bars to idly pace said stone cell, already bored of looking at the Auradon faces in front of her. Ben made the bold choice to ignore her little quips, turning to Carlos and silently gesturing to be handed the parchment he carried in his blazer pocket. Carlos did so, unfolding the paper and giving it to Ben, who eyed the drawing on it worriedly before looking back to Mal.  
  
"We think that Bald Mountain has something to do with all that's happening, and when my friends here tried to look into it..." Ben turned the parchment out to show her. "...Do you know anything about this?"  
  
Mal slunk close again, drawing into the torchlight to glance at what the king was trying to show her.  
  
And cackling with a horribly amused smile as she did so. The sound of her laughter sent chills down everyone's spines.   
  
"Good old Chernabog," Mal spoke as if greeting a lifelong friend, something Ben and the VKs knew the Mistress of All Evil couldn't possibly have.  
  
"...Good?" Carlos's ears perked up, and he unknowingly ventured closer to the prison cell before Jay closed a hand around his shoulder and pulled him back.  
  
"Figure of speech, pint size," Mal cut her eyes sideways at him. "This thing makes  _me_  look like Snow White, playing with forest rodents and baking pies in my spare time."  
  
They knew it looked dark. They knew it looked evil. But an evil worse than the reigning queen of evil? Impossible. Within the borders of Auradon, no less? Simply impossible. None of them could wrap their heads around it. Ben didn't even take the time to try, just kept his focus and prodded Mal further.  
  
"What  _is_  this thing, this Chernabog?" he demanded in his kingly voice, as if Mal could ever be any level of intimidated by him.  
  
"Oh, you know. Chernabog," Mal shrugged, for their urgency and worry was merely all a game to her. "Ancient immortal evil, demon of Bald Mountain, been hibernating up there for a couple millennia now? Ringing a bell? Which, by the way, you probably shouldn't do, because every dark prophecy out there foretells of the destruction of the world when this thing wakes up again. He's not a morning demon, I can relate."  
  
Jay didn't take the conversation as lightly as Mal, bravely storming forward and clenching his gloved fists around the bars as if he meant to tear them loose and demand that Mal elaborate further.  
  
"The destruction of the world?!" he snapped in disbelief.  
  
"...Ben, the earthquakes," Evie's voice was a choked whisper as she touched her hand to Ben's arm, her eyes wide with such fear as it all started to come together.  
  
"All the lightning, the thunderstorms, the seas churning like crazy, all the...the  _apocalyptic_  weather," Carlos too realized.  
  
Mal had no qualms about letting the four stand there and stew in their own panic for a moment or so, a smile cruelly brightening more and more as she flicked her gaze from Ben, to Evie, to Carlos, to Jay. Another cackle, another sign that Mal was having a most amusing time with her poor unfortunate visitors.  
  
"Calm down, you preps. It's only a myth," she finally told them.  
  
Evie raised a skeptical eyebrow.  
  
"A myth?" she repeated.  
  
 _"Myth,_  fairytale, something not  _real,"_  Mal stressed. "Geez, I guess you people will believe any scary story when you're tucked away from the dark in your nice warm beds."  
  
Now Evie was finding her bravery, slowly but surely with enchanted bars between her and the Mistress of All Evil.  
  
"I don't come from a nice warm bed," she flatly informed Mal. "I come from the Isle of the Lost, same as you. I know evil, and I know what it looks like. My world suddenly turning cold and dark? That's evil. What you call fairytales, Auradon calls history."  
  
"...Does it now?" Mal recognized fire, and was impressed to see it flaring to life in the Auradon girl's eyes.  
  
Ben, who was lost for a moment in the depiction of Chernabog drawn to life on the parchment ages ago, shook himself out of it and slipped the paper into the interior pocket of his own royal blue jacket.   
  
"It's too much of a coincidence," he said with authority. "Disturbances tracing back to Bald Mountain, a drawing of a monster perched at its peak, this story of Chernabog...guys, we came down here to find answers. Maybe we've already found them."  
  
The VKs desperately didn't want to believe it. How could they? The end of the world?  _Their_  world? At the hands of a monster so dark and foreboding it frightened even them?  
  
"...Auradon is in danger," Ben somberly said. "And as the king, the kingdom is mine to protect. If there's even the smallest chance that this monster is real and threatening our future, it's my duty to look into it. A threat is a threat."  
  
"Ben, we know nothing about this," Evie reminded him. "If some dark and ancient evil is about to arise, we don't stand a chance."  
  
"Then we'll fight evil with evil. Mal will help us."  
  
It was news to Mal, who backed up and eyed Ben up and down like he'd lost his royal mind.  
  
"And why would I do that for you?" she questioned.  
  
Evie and the boys knew the sight of Ben shifting into his authority pose very well. Squaring his shoulders, standing tall, holding his head up high; all of it unfolded before their eyes as Ben faced off with Mal. But posture was one thing, tone was another thing entirely.  
  
"I-I am your king!" he tried to raise his voice, but the trembling betrayed him.  
  
Mal was nonplussed, crossing her arms and snickering.  
  
"You're not a king, you're a skinny maraca," she scoffed.  
  
"Ben, fighting against evil? Evil is kind of her whole deal," Jay gestured to Mal, who lifted a hand to wave. "She would never help us."  
  
"Well, no. Not for nothing," Ben admitted, sounding suspiciously like he had a plan.  
  
"You can't offer her anything, there's nothing that she wants," Carlos tried to reason, daring to talk about Mal like she wasn't even in the room.  
  
"...Yes there is. She wants what every single villain in this kingdom wants—freedom."  
  
Ben's words were like a bomb dropping, the arguments of his friends instantly erupting around him like the subsequent explosion, a mushroom cloud of noise pinging off the stone walls.  
  
"Are you kidding??"  
  
"Ben, there's  _no_  way!"  
  
"You can't just set her loose!"  
  
"—Powerful enough to break through the  _barrier!!"_  
  
"—Doomed for sure if you let her out..."  
  
"You'd put the safety of everyone in the kingdom in danger!"  
  
Ben held up his hands in an attempt to quiet everyone before their words got deafening.  
  
"Guys,  _guys!!_  Hey! I know!" he shouted. "...I know. I told you all that being a king meant having to make the tough choices, and this is just another one of those times. Mal says it's only a myth, but the rest of us feel otherwise. Chernabog and the darkness it brings with it would be the greatest threat that Auradon has ever faced, and Evie, like you said, we wouldn't stand a chance. Not without Mal's power and knowledge. If she agrees to help us, I'll go right back up those stairs and authorize her release."  
  
"What, just so you can shove me back behind bars when all is said and done and Auradon is back to normal? Hardly. I'm not an idiot,  _your majesty,"_  Mal glared at the king with her hands in the pockets of her purple and green jacket.  
  
"You can't make this deal," Evie still argued, locking her eyes on Ben's. "Maleficent raised her to follow in her footsteps and then she did just that, outgrowing her mom's training and becoming powerful enough on her own to not be bound by the magic of the barrier anymore."  
  
"What can I say, I'm a quick study," Mal quipped.  
  
"It's a miracle that  _this_  magic can even hold her—" Evie tugged on the iron bars for emphasis, "—But if you let her out of here for any reason then we're done for. She'll turn on us, take over Auradon, destroy it before this Chernabog thing even gets a chance to, and—"  
  
"I am not my mother," a brand new kind of darkness passed over Mal's face, one that made Ben and his friends instinctively take a collective step back. "I don't give a talking rat's behind about the kingdom or anyone in it, if I wanted to take over I would've done it the day I escaped The Isle and we wouldn't even be having this conversation right now."  
  
It was hard for them to comprehend a Mistress of Evil who didn't have sole domination and utter conquest on her mind.  
  
"...Well if you don't want to take over Auradon then what do you want?" Evie questioned, knowing every villain had a motive.  
  
The darkness casting an almost palpable veil across Mal's features cleared away just as quickly as it had settled into place, making way for that trademark wicked grin to flash once more like the glint of a blade.  
  
"I just want to have some good clean evil fun."  
  
A proverbial lightbulb blinked to life above Ben's head. He could work with that.  
  
"Then this is your deal," he brought back the authority and command of his regal-sounding voice. "If you agree to help us, and stop the rise of this evil, then you will be released from your solitary confinement and returned to The Isle of the Lost."  
  
"What??" Jay and Carlos gasped at the same time.  
  
 _"What?"_  Evie still had plenty of fight left in her. "Ben, you can't do that, she'll have her magic! She could terrorize other Isle-goers, or escape all over again...she wants some good clean evil fun? How about shattering the barrier completely and watching as all the other villains come swarming to Auradon??"  
  
"I like the way she thinks," Mal pointed at Evie.  
  
Ben didn't seem to be able to look at Evie as he spoke his next words.  
  
"Evie, you know I'm always so grateful for your counsel, and I always will be, but I'm the ruler of Auradon. Not you. Therefore, the ultimate decision lies with me, and this is my decision. Mal, I offer you the chance to return your sentence to The Isle of the Lost in exchange for your help and knowledge of Chernabog."  
  
Mal snickered. The sound of her fiendish delight still made everyone shiver.  
  
"Well aren't you the prim and proper little king?" she said mockingly.  
  
Ben bristled.  
  
"Do we have a deal or not?"  
  
"A chance to get out of this magic-less crypt just to chase a boogeyman and watch all of you squirm? ...Now how could I say no to that?"  
  
Evie's blood turned to ice in her veins, and she was sure the boys were reacting the same. The Mistress of All Evil, released from the only prison capable of holding her and free to walk among them. The thought was frightening enough on The Isle, where Mal was only a whisper, a shadow that Evie and the boys had never seen, Maleficent's pet project that they were loathe to bump into in a darkened alleyway. But the truth was that while Ben was their friend, he was also their king, and as he'd said, his word was law.  
  
"Then it's settled," there was a hint of relief in Ben's voice, even though the situation was far from relieving. "So...tell us more about Chernabog."  
  
The Mistress of All Evil slithered in close, pressing her face to the bars so her smile shone just so in the torchlight.  
  
"...Let me out of this cage and we'll talk."

* * *

The VKs were powerless to do anything but stand and watch as Ben dipped a quill in the inkwell at the guard station and signed his name to the papers that would set Mal free. The grumpy guard wasn't too pleased with the arrangement himself, following every stroke of Ben's signature with a sour face, but he didn't dare argue with the king's orders. 

"Ben, at least think about backing out of this," Evie urged him, stressfully pacing the floor.  
  
"She's not going to behave when she's set loose on The Isle again," Jay added. "Like Evie said, Mal may not want to invade Auradon, but she'll sure get a kick out of watching someone else do it."  
  
Ben straightened up from where he had stooped over the guard's desk to sign on the dotted line, setting the quill down and turning around to face his friends.  
  
"...She's not going to The Isle," he quietly said, again finding it hard to look any of the VKs directly in the eye. "...When all of this is over she's coming right back to her prison cell here."  
  
Carlos's lips parted in awe.  
  
"...You lied to her??"  
  
Ben wasn't proud of it. Lying to someone about their fate, even if that someone was the worst villain in the land? He wasn't at all proud of it. All he did was try to justify himself, with Evie as his backup.  
  
"Evie was right, she's just too dangerous for us to risk it. Through study and sheer will alone she was able to unleash magic too strong to be contained by the barrier, and I won't let that happen again."  
  
"But letting her walk free in a place that doesn't even  _have_  a barrier isn't much of a trade-up," Jay pointed out with a long-suffering roll of his eyes.  
  
"Then it's obvious that we really don't have much of a choice here, do we Jay? I'm doing the best I can," Ben snapped a bit.  
  
Risking Mal versus risking Chernabog. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.  
  
With the papers signed, three guards who had been waiting dutifully along the wall moved single file to descend into the caves and retrieve Mal, but when Ben caught sight of their path he threw out an arm to stop them.  
  
"No, no guards," he insisted. "I'll bring her up myself."  
  
"You will?" Carlos squeaked.  
  
Ben nodded.  
  
"Our only hope here is to get Mal to trust us. That means no guards, no red tape, just us."  
  
"It's against our better judgement, your highness," one of the guards gruffly said.  
  
"It's against my better judgement too, believe me," Ben sighed.  
  
Carlos shoved his hands in the pockets of his shorts, hunching his shoulders and shrugging.  
  
"Okay, so, how do you disenchant Mal's cell to get her out?" he asked.  
  
As if on cue, the disgruntled guard behind the desk turned to unlock a glass case fitted on the wall, within which hung a large silver key ring with a single, equally large key.  
  
"...Seriously?" Jay raised an eyebrow as the guard handed over the key ring to Ben. "You've literally got the keys to Mal's freedom hanging in plain sight?"  
  
Ben chuckled in spite of himself.  
  
"This is a secure location, Jay. Until today me, my parents, and the guards were the only people in Auradon who knew where this prison was."  
  
That, Evie figured, must have been the reason why the guards kept eyeing her and the boys with narrowed glances. The VKs were in on the secret.  
  
"...Okay. I'm going back down," Ben said after a deep breath, clutching the key ring tight.  
  
"I'm going with you," Evie started right after him with no hesitation.  
  
Ben only nodded, leading Evie back to the door to the stairwell that descended deep underground. Stepping from the modern facade of the guardhouse to the stone steps lit only by torches was like time travel, spinning Evie's mind as Ben lifted a torch from its sconce and carried it with him.  
  
"...What was all of this before it was a prison for Mal?" she wondered.  
  
"Not sure," Ben answered easily, as if he'd never given it a second thought. "It was just kind of...here. Auradon as a kingdom may be new, but the land we built it on is ancient. Probably full of secrets."  
  
"...Like a secret demonic evil lurking on top of Bald Mountain," Evie shuddered.  
  
"I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but let's hope the Mistress of Evil is right...let's hope Chernabog is only a myth."  
  
"Yes...let's hope."  
  
Mal was studying her nails by the time Ben and Evie navigated the tunnels and made it back to her cell, like six months of incarceration was just a boring afternoon to her.  
  
"Finally. What, did you two get lost up there?" Mal snapped from the shadows.  
  
"Sorry...paperwork," Evie thought to say.  
  
"Didn't seem to take much paperwork to get me thrown in here in the first place, now, did it?"  
  
Ben cleared his throat and brandished the key ring like a show of goodwill. Evie realized she'd forgotten to ask Ben if he had any sort of contingency plan in case Mal turned on them and unleashed her almost unstoppable dark magic.  
  
It was probably for the best. She imagined that she didn't quite want to hear the answer.  
  
"None of us are getting  _any_  younger here," Mal rolled her eyes as Ben fumbled with the key and the lock.  
  
"Sorry, it's just...aha, got it."  
  
If Evie wasn't staring right at the bars she would've missed it; an almost imperceptible shimmer as the lock clicked, like a heat mirage wafting up from pavement. Magic being broken. Ben swung the cell door open with a creak, and out stepped Mal, out from the darkness of her prison and into the firelight.  
  
From behind the bars Evie could only see shining emerald, a shadowed face, fleeting wisps of purple. Here, in the light, Evie got her first proper look at the Mistress of All Evil. The way that purple fell in effortless waves around her surprisingly soft face, the twist in her pouty lips when she met Ben with a crocodile grin, and the subsequent dimple that settled into her cheek along with it.  
  
"Thanks Bennyboo," she jeered, giving Ben a condescending pat on his shoulder.  
  
"...How did you—?" his eyes widened slightly.  
  
"Do you really want an answer?" Mal crossed her arms.  
  
Ben seemed to think it over for a moment.  
  
"...No. No, I suppose I don't," he quietly said.  
  
Mal snickered and then took the lead, leaving her cell behind without a single look back as she pushed through the heavy wooden door and started up the stone steps.  
  
"...Ben, what have we done?" Evie worriedly whispered in his ear.  
  
"...We'll find out soon enough, Evie. We'll find out soon enough."  
  
Back up top, in the guardhouse, each and every one of the guards reflexively reached for their swords when the young sorceress walked into the room.  
  
"...Is that supposed to scare me?" Mal raised an eyebrow and smiled.  
  
Ben motioned for everyone to stand at ease, lest Mal go full-on master of magic in a haughty display of power. The guards obeyed their king, lowering their hands from the hilts of their swords, but still their wary eyes never left Mal. Contrariwise, Mal quickly lost her interest in them, turning to Ben and her fellow Villain Kids.  
  
"So. You need my help. You think some big bad is about to rise and in a hilarious turn of events, I'm your only hope. That sort of makes me the guest of honor in your kingdom now, don't you think?"  
  
Evie and the boys looked appalled. Ben was smart enough to play along.  
  
"O-of course!" he quickly said. "We have a royal limo just ready and waiting for you outside."  
  
"Oh, a limo!" Mal feigned an interest. "You  _must_  be desperate. This is going to be fun."  
  
They all had a difficult time figuring her out, and frankly, they were afraid to really try. Although it seemed like an entire lifetime ago, Evie, Carlos, and Jay dimly recalled a time when "Mistress of All Evil" was a title bestowed to Maleficent, not Mal. But everyone on The Isle knew that Maleficent sought to raise a carbon copy of herself, a second evil sorceress to take over Auradon and sit at her side with matching thrones, Hers and Hers crowns. It started small. Graffiti in the alleys, stealing candy from babies, scribbling black eyes and mustaches on the posters of Fairy Godmother and King Beast that littered The Isle.  
  
But it wasn't enough for Maleficent. Soon enough the denizens of the island talked less and less of Mal, for there was little to talk about. She was never seen, never glimpsed. Neither was Maleficent, who was always a common sight skulking around her balcony with her powerless scepter in tow. People guessed that the two now stayed holed up in their castle, but what they could've been scheming behind stone walls was a mystery.  
  
Until spellbooks started disappearing in the dead of night, scrolls of curses and writings of the blackest magics went missing from the pawn shops and private collections. Rumors of split-second flashes of green seen coming from the castle, bursts of light come and gone so fast that no one was ever really able to tell if such a thing was real or just one's eyes playing tricks on one. Jay, Carlos, and Evie were thankfully rescued from The Isle around that time, whisked away from the dark whispers and feeling of foreboding that came to hang in the air like the foul stench always permeating the island.  
  
And here they were, six months later, stuffed inside a limo with the very girl who was the cause of every single dark whisper and dreadfully ominous fear. Ben hadn't taken a chauffeur on account of the nature of their business, so he sat safe behind the wheel and behind the tinted partition with Jay at his side in the passenger's seat, reluctantly leaving Evie and Carlos to entertain their "guest of honor" in the back. Not that she needed much entertaining, preoccupied with enjoying all the snacks and complimentary candy. In a twisted way, they really had to hand it to her; she certainly lived up to the name "Mistress of All Evil". Just watching her methodically pick through jellybeans was a scary thing to see. Like lining up her victims for slaughter.  
  
It was too quiet, and Evie absolutely hated it. The silence begged to be filled with conversation, even if only small talk, but how in the world was one supposed to make small talk with the worst villain in the land? Carlos certainly wasn't going to make an attempt, he was pressed as close to the window as he could get with his eyes locked on the countryside scenery, looking very much like he would melt right into the door and disappear forever if he could.  
  
"So...how do you know about Chernabog?" Evie finally made an attempt.  
  
Mal looked up from her little glass of jellybeans, and Evie swore that smile of hers was reminding her more and more of a crocodile.  
  
"He owes me money."  
  
Carlos, alone in the seat across from Evie, shot her a nervous look that said to just stay quiet, like Mal was a wild animal and they could save themselves from being eaten alive if they just kept still and very, very silent. But Evie didn't have to make another attempt at conversation, because Mal did it for her, glancing away from her candy again and narrowing her eyes at Evie.  
  
"Whose daughter are you?" she bluntly asked.  
  
That stare made Evie's heart race, beats quickening like she'd fallen victim to her fight-or-flight reflex.  
  
"...The Evil Queen's," she quietly answered, looking down at her hands in her lap.  
  
"The Evil Queen," Mal repeated the words in a tone of voice that implied she should've known all along. "Impressive."  
  
Evie didn't think that was quite the word for it. But Ben said their only hope was to get Mal to trust them, and that would never happen by treating Mal like a ticking time bomb, no matter how much she really was. Hence, continued conversation.  
  
"I don't have any magic, though," Evie went on, peeking at Mal out of the corner of her eye to gauge a reaction.  
  
"Is that so? Not even—" Mal simply snapped her fingers and her hand was instantly ablaze with a sickly green flame. "—This?"  
  
Carlos shrieked, his seatbelt the only thing that kept him from tumbling to the floor of the limo. Evie's eyes went wide, knowing that to someone like Mal this was only a parlor trick, not even the tip of the iceberg for the villainess who surpassed her mother and broke through the barrier.  
  
"What's the matter, mommy told you not to play with fire?" Mal leaned forward in her seat to torment Carlos, the poor boy feeling the heat from the flames.  
  
"Quit it!" the high-pitched trill of his voice was music to Mal's ears.   
  
"Mal, don't!" Evie urged her.  
  
The hum of the partition beginning to open sounded, and with another snap of the fingers Mal extinguished the fire.  
  
"Hey, what's going on back there?" Ben asked, he and Jay looking at them in the rearview mirror.  
  
What a sight they must have made. Carlos curled into a ball, arms over his head, Evie with her hands hovering, unsure of what to do, Mal leaning back comfortably in her seat like a bonafide halo was about to pop to life over her head.  
  
"Show and tell," she answered pleasantly.  
  
Jay turned around in his seat, favoring his own two eyes over the reflection in a mirror.  
  
"...Carlos? You good?" he questioned.  
  
"...Super," Carlos squeaked.  
  
Jay and Ben were of course wary, but Ben closed the partition once more, leaving the unlikely trio to themselves. Carlos slowly uncurled, and Evie relaxed as well with a heavy exhale.  
  
"...Oh yeah," Mal idly studied the purple jellybean between her fingertips like it was the most fascinating thing in the world. "...This is going to be  _so_  much fun."

* * *

At the very back of Auradon Prep and just at the edge of the forest was the King's Entrance, reserved specifically for Ben with a parking space for the limo and an elegant double staircase that led directly up to his office. Massive clouds so dark gray they were almost black were swirling in the sky, keeping the lawns of the school completely devoid of anyone by the time the gang returned, no one around to see them drive up. Exactly as Ben had wanted; panic at an earthquake was one thing, panic at the Mistress of All Evil showing up at the front door was another. He brought the limousine to a stop, and everyone piled out.  
  
"Welcome to Auradon Prep," he proudly said to Mal, closing his door behind him.  
  
Although the overall vibrancy of the aboveground world had been reduced to an ugly pallor as of late, Mal still squinted in the daytime light like any kind of bright was just  _too_  bright for a master of darkness.  
  
"Charmed," she grumbled.  
  
"This is where we go to school," Carlos cautiously told her.  
  
"In a castle. Imagine that. And to think, the rest of us poor Villain Kids were wasting our education in a mausoleum."  
  
They just couldn't win with her. Already they should've known better than to keep trying.  
  
"...My office is this way," Ben gestured up the stairs. "We can talk in there."  
  
He didn't know what exactly he was expecting. The Mistress of All Evil to be impressed by his stately decor? Perhaps it was just foolish princely vanity that thought someone like Mal might have something to say about the regal office he was so proud of, the home away from home where everyday he was learning to lead. In lieu of a boyish little smile and a  _"Well, what do you think?"_  Ben simply watched Mal's expression as they all filed into the room, trying to gauge a reaction.  
  
"Why are you staring at me?" Mal demanded.  
  
A nonplussed reaction. Zero reaction at all, in point of fact. Strange, it was almost as if she didn't  _care._  Ben would've invited her to have a seat but she was two steps ahead of him, literally, roughly shouldering past everyone and dropping down into the chair behind Ben's desk.  
  
"Oh..." Ben lifted a finger to object. "Um, actually..."  
  
Mal viciously stared him down as she leaned back and propped her feet up on the desk with two identical thuds.  
  
"...Alright, well, as long as you're comfortable," Ben conceded.  
  
Like a gentleman, he offered one of the plush armchairs to Evie, and let Carlos get cozy in the one beside her.  
  
"First thing's first—no one but us can know that Mal is here," Ben announced. "I won't tell Audrey, and Evie, you can't even let Doug know."  
  
That would make for a very complicated sell when Doug returned with the marching band and asked for a status update, but Evie couldn't really protest. The knowledge of Mal's newfound freedom was something that absolutely couldn't get past the four walls of the room around them. Jay, leaning against the fireplace, scoffed at the idea.  
  
"What are we going to do, throw a cloak around her? Dye her hair blonde and call her Chloe?"  
  
"That's a great way to earn yourself a little trip to a nightmare dimension," Mal warned him.  
  
None of them really wanted to think too hard about how much good Mal could make on that threat.  
  
"Jay has a point, where in the world would we hide her?" Evie fretted.  
  
Mal—a bored expression on her face—snapped her fingers, inadvertently making Carlos flinch a little.  
  
"Try 'in plain sight'," she said.  
  
Ben and the VKs met each other with confused stares, unsure what she was talking about. Mal let out a long-suffering sigh.  
  
"What, do I have to spell out  _everything_  for you guys??"  
  
She grudgingly got up from Ben's seat and circled the desk, crossing the room to where Jay stood. Hanging above the fireplace was Ben's royal portrait, in an ornate wooden frame. Mal took one look at it and began to wave her hands in a surprisingly delicate and graceful manner—almost like a dance, a ballet—all while murmuring a string of words under her breath that none of them could hear or understand, not even Jay, standing as close to her as he was.  
  
Before their very eyes Ben's painted image vanished with a silvery shimmer, and smooth, reflective glass took its place within the wooden frame.  
  
"Whoa..." Ben, Carlos, and Evie all gasped at once.  
  
 _"Whoa!"_ Jay blurted the word with a vastly different inflection, taking a startled step back and pointing a finger at what was now the mirror above the fireplace.  
  
Four of them were reflected back in the mirror image of the office, but one was not. Mal. Standing clear as a bell in front of them but nowhere to be seen in the mirror.  
  
"It's called a glamour, people. I could do it in my sleep," Mal informed them.  
  
Carlos was the one who processed it all first, how Mal snapping her fingers was the thing that had done it.  
  
"...So only we can see you now, and no one else can?" he clarified.  
  
Mal nodded.  
  
"Great. Now we'll all just look like we're talking to ourselves," Evie muttered.  
  
"All magic comes with a price," Mal shrugged and went back to the desk, propping her feet up comfortably once more.  
  
"...Well then, that takes care of that," Ben said, before casting a concerned glance at what was once his portrait. "...Um, Mal? Could you—?"  
  
Mal rolled her eyes and gave a much simpler wave of her hand, like merely shooing away a fly, and soon the painting of Ben replaced the mirror once more in the same sparkle of silver it disappeared in. Mal really  _did_  have quite a few tricks up her sleeve. Already everyone could easily see how she'd managed to crack through the barrier.  
  
"Hey, can you turn a pumpkin into a carriage?" Jay inquisitively wondered.  
  
"Can. Not going to."  
  
"Let's focus here," Ben said, slipping his hands into the pockets of his blazer and beginning to pace. "A giant monster could be coming to destroy Auradon."  
  
"Ben, we still don't know if Chernabog is even real," Evie tried to reason, more so to alleviate her own fears than to alleviate Ben's.   
  
But Ben shook his head with the realization of a sad truth.  
  
"As the king, I have to treat it like it's real."  
  
"But if we don't know for sure, then what?" Carlos asked. "How do we fight against an imaginary creature? I mean, yeah, Bald Mountain and the natural disasters are really freaky coincidences, but Mal said that Chernabog is a myth. I figure if anyone knows evil beings, it's her."  
  
"I used to play cards with several of them," the Mistress of All Evil was surprisingly well-equipped with wisecracks.  
  
Evie knew it was very wrong of her to do so, but she couldn't help but smile a little. Turning her head away from the others to hide it, the smile came because Mal's oh-so-flippant outlook on their crisis was a nice little relief to all the gloom and doom that had been plaguing Evie's life as of late.  
  
"If all we could find on History Island was some old drawing, how do you expect us to ever find anything else on Chernabog?" Jay was back with the gloom and doom, talking with his hands and wiping the smile from Evie's lips. "From what Mal's already told us this thing is like, lost to the ages old. Unless it springs to life overnight and destroys us all in our sleep, we may never know if Chernabog is real or not."  
  
"Has anyone bothered to  _look?"_  Mal interrupted in a rather annoyed tone.  
  
Heads swiveled on the spot and they all stared incredulously at her.  
  
"...What?" Ben frowned.  
  
"What do you mean 'what'? You find a picture of a giant demon sitting on top of Bald Mountain and no one thinks to poke their head up there and check it out?"  
  
"The mountain is impossible to scale," Evie explained to her. "You can only get a few hundred feet up before it's all sheer cliff faces, there's no way to reach the summit."  
  
Now it was  _Mal_  who looked incredulously back at  _them._  
  
"You live in a kingdom full of magic and you really can't think of any other way to get someplace besides  _walking?"_  the pure bewildered judgement in Mal's tone of voice was very obvious. "Geez, I really do have to do everything for you people, don't I?"  
  
Again Mal was up and out of her seat, suddenly trying to urge Evie and Carlos up too.  
  
"Hey, Princess and Scaredy-Cat, move it," she snapped her fingers at them in a non-magic capacity.  
  
Carlos did what she demanded and abandoned his seat, but Evie stayed put.  
  
"Why?" she questioned.  
  
The Mistress of Evil wasn't used to being questioned. She was mainly used to people doing what she said. If it were anyone other than the Evil Queen's daughter she might've turned them into an insect and squished them flat, but alas, Mal held a modicum of respect for that old hag. Poisoning an apple and feeding it to a child was inspired, after all. That modicum of respect was the sole reason that Mal indulged in answering Evie.  
  
"Because I need room to work," she spoke like the answer should've been obvious as she pushed Carlos's chair back and out of the way.  
  
It seemed to be a reasonable enough response for Evie, who got to her feet and started pushing her own leather armchair back. After moving aside the round end table as well, a nice little space was cleared in the middle of the rug, and Mal held out her hand to Ben.  
  
"Pixie dust," she firmly said.  
  
Ben could only respond with a blank stare at first.  
  
"I don't have any pixie dust," he said, the pitch of his voice rising in surprise.  
  
"This is Auradon Prep, not Neverland, we don't just go walking around with pixie dust in our pockets," Jay chuckled, before remembering just who he was talking to and immediately burying his own impish grin.  
  
"I don't even know where I would find any here," Ben added.  
  
"Is the headmistress of this school Fairy Godmother or not?" Mal demanded.  
  
Okay, she had a point, but still.  
  
"What do you need pixie dust for?" the giant question mark above Ben's head was practically visible.  
  
"For the love of all that's rotten, could you just go get some??"  
  
Ben really should've been more concerned about his odds of being turned into an insect.  
  
"Fairy Godmother  _does_  have some magical things on the bookshelves in her office, even if she only uses them for decoration now," Evie reminded him.  
  
Mal was visibly repulsed at the thought of someone reducing magical items to mere decorations on a bookshelf.  
  
Finally realizing that he very well may have been pushing his luck by making the mistake of questioning Mal, Ben agreed to go take a look, and left his office behind to head for Fairy Godmother's. Evie, however, was rather confident with her luck, and her inquisitive curiosity couldn't help but continue to question Mal.  
  
"...So what  _do_  you need pixie dust for?" she asked, watching Mal size up the space she'd cleared.  
  
"Teleportation spell. Pixie dust, raven feather, incantation, easy peasy."  
  
Mal reached inside her jacket and pulled out said raven feather, like it was a charm she had simply always carried around with her long before she was ever imprisoned.  
  
"I thought your family pet was turned to stone?" Carlos said, wisely guessing the feather's origins.  
  
"You'd be surprised how much punching a hole through a magic barrier will undo."  
  
Jay drew in close, his eyes narrowing warily.  
  
"You ever done a spell like this before?" he wondered, almost skeptically. As if it were at all wise to doubt Mal's power.  
  
And of course Mal didn't take the inadvertent dig to her "talents" lightly. Carlos and Evie watched in helpless horror as Mal slowly advanced on Jay with all the calculating carefulness of a wild beast hunkered down low in the brush, unwary prey in its sights.  
  
"...I am the Mistress of All Evil. I've done spells you've only seen in your nightmares. My mother's old title came to me because I earned it, because  _Mal_  is the name the kingdom fears now. She was the last one who doubted what I could do, and doubting me didn't exactly agree with her."  
  
Mal's words brought Evie to the startling realization that even on the mainland they'd heard very little of Maleficent as of late. When the barrier broke and Mal became the kingdom's new Big Bad, it seemed as if Maleficent had just dropped right off the map.  
  
"...Where  _is_  your mother?" Evie anxiously asked.  
  
"Let's just say that green is a good color on her."  
  
Evie had no idea what that could possibly mean, and like so many other things Mal had said and done in just the few hours since meeting her, she really didn't want to frighten herself by thinking too long and hard about it. She paced instead, a slow back and forth across the carpet as she got a different set of thoughts in order.  
  
"So you magic us to the top of Bald Mountain, and...if there really is something there? Then what?" she nervously asked, unknowingly wringing her hands.  
  
Mal was giving her raven feather a few idle waves, not even looking at Evie as she spoke.  
  
"That's a pretty big 'if', Princess. As far as I'm concerned you're all wasting my time, but hey, whatever gets me time off for good behavior."  
  
"Whoa, we're not letting you go that easily," Jay held up a hand the way Ben tended to do, a single gesture to stop a person in their tracks. "Even if there's nothing on top of Bald Mountain we've still got what looks a lot like an apocalypse stirring in Auradon that  _you_  are going to help us fight."  
  
Carlos saw it in the way Mal tensed, but didn't even have a chance to get Jay's name out in warning before the villainess lifted a hand in a cruel mockery of Jay and then clenched it into a tight fist. He dropped to his knees like collapsing under the weight of a bag of bricks on his shoulders, his face going red with pain.  
  
"You've got an awfully small brain to be running such a big mouth," Mal said coldly.  
  
"No!!" Evie shouted, urgently stepping towards Mal like she stood any kind of a chance of stopping her.  
  
"Leave him alone!" Carlos shouted too.  
  
Mal ignored the both of them.  
  
"Think you're a big shot because you're friends with the king? Villain Kid of The Isle no more? On the side of good now, triumphing over evil? Newsflash, Auradon boy, good  _used_  to triumph over evil before evil became  _me."_  
  
She only meant to make a hideously cruel point, releasing her hand from its fist and subsequently releasing Jay from her dark magic. He fell flat on his chest with heavy breaths, a proper color slowly but surely returning to his face as Carlos rushed over to check on him.  
  
Evie didn't know what she would've done if Mal continued to torment him. Grab her, shove her, she had no idea, but either way her heart was pounding and her nerves tingling with the thought of having to face off against Mal.  
  
"You...you can't just go around  _hurting_  people!!" Evie sharply told her, trying to steady the breaths that the racing heartbeat was taking out of her.  
  
"Not unless they give me a reason to, which everyone always does."  
  
"Mal, it doesn't have to be like that! I grew up on The Isle too, and—"  
  
"But you didn't grow up with my mother!" Mal snapped, eyes appearing to flare a bright, glowing green for a fraction of a second. "Growing up on The Isle and growing up with Maleficent are two completely different things. So don't kid yourself, Princess. You and I are not the same."  
  
The sudden silence they were left in was tense and dangerous, Evie and the boys were very much afraid. Mal was angry, and unpredictable, and she held all the cards. All the power. Should she decide to snap, there was nothing that any of them could do to stop her.  
  
The surprise of Ben's sudden return was enough to break the strain as he came back into his office clearly victorious with a drawstring pouch in hand. He was woefully unaware that anything had happened in his absence, sure that everything was exactly as he'd left it. And why not? He was only gone a few short moments, hurrying to Fairy Godmother's office and back. How could he expect even a Mistress of Evil to cause trouble in such a short amount of time?  
  
"...Mal, this is stealing," he said in grim disapproval as he shook the bag of pixie dust for emphasis.  
  
Mal cared not, coming over and snatching the pouch right out of his hand.  
  
"Think of it as borrowing."  
  
Ben watched as Mal dug into the bag and grabbed a handful of pixie dust, a golden shimmering powder that carried a distinct tinkling sound as Mal started sprinkling it in a circle around the floor.  
  
"Mal, if we're going to let you—" Ben heard what he was saying the second it left his mouth and immediately stopped himself. "...I mean, if you're going to be casting spells, you should let us know when and what for."  
  
Jay, Carlos, and Evie eyed the king with a hard stare. If only he knew.  
  
"If some dusty doodle and a stupid legend has you convinced there's a monster on Bald Mountain, then you can go up there and see for yourselves," Mal explained for his benefit.  
  
"But you're coming with us, right?"  
  
"Well  _someone_  has to portal you back, don't they? As tempting as it is to leave you all stuck up there, stranding the king makes my job a little  _too_  easy."  
  
"Your job of what?" Carlos asked.  
  
"Of spreading evil and ruining lives. It's just not as much fun when there's no one around trying to ruin your plans. Unchecked mayhem gets old real fast," Mal smiled.  
  
Spreading evil and ruining lives. Evie knew that line. That was Maleficent talking. She wondered, just then, exactly how much of the girl they saw in front of them was Mal and how much was the daughter of Maleficent.  
  
"Let's just go already," Jay growled, ready to uncover the truth about the trouble in Auradon so they could get this uneasy alliance over with and be done with Mal for good.  
  
"Ladies first," Mal said to him, bowing and moving out of his way.  
  
Jay just glared, too wary of her power to take any real action against her yet too proud to let her get away with the cruel taunting unscathed.  
  
"I'm not waiting on an RSVP, genius, get in the circle," Mal ordered, pointing down at the ring of pixie dust.  
  
Ben studied the circle, then Mal, then the raven feather in Mal's hand.  
  
"...Will this be safe?" he timidly questioned.  
  
"Will anyone in your kingdom be if you don't find out why your world is falling apart?" Mal retorted. "Get in the circle."  
  
"Ben...just do as she says," Evie cautiously warned, being the first to follow her own advice and stepping into the bounds of the pixie dust.  
  
Blind trust was something they seriously couldn't afford to put in the Mistress of All Evil, but given the circumstances, they had no other choice. How did they know this spell Mal was planning was really what she said? That this circle of pixie dust wouldn't zap them to another dimension or kill them in an instant? How did they know Mal wasn't bluffing about unchecked mayhem and was just  _dying_  to get rid of the king and lay waste to Auradon? The truth was that they didn't know. And it was simply terrifying. For her own fleeting sense of well-being and peace of mind, Evie had spent all day trying to figure out Mal and her motives, but still she had gotten no further than the second they first saw the villainess slinking around in the dark behind a wall of iron bars.  
  
"Keep your hands and feet inside the circle, kids. If any of you end up at Bald Mountain with a missing leg don't come crying to me," Mal said, cracking her knuckles.   
  
They were all huddled together now, as was Mal, with the drawstrings of the pouch tied around a belt loop and her feather in hand.  
  
"Wait, are we dressed for Bald Mountain?" Carlos piped up, looking down at his black and white shorts.  
  
Mal could care less.  
  
"This is no time for a costume change, freckles."  
  
No time indeed, for with absolutely no warning Mal's eyes flashed an impossibly bright green, like emerald struck by dazzlingly supernatural sunlight.  
  
 _"Envokas portae per nostro faire!"_  Mal recited, waving her raven's feather around the gang and speaking a language that none of them recognized.  
  
And then the world around them was swallowed up in a tumultuous storm of purple, like the sights and sounds of a thundercloud bursting to life before them. The roar of it was deafening, and they couldn't even see each other within the whirlwind. Ben's first and automatic reaction was to yell for his friends, to try and reach out for them, yet he couldn't even hear his own voice over the din, and the chaotic cloud of magic blinded him to the sight of Evie and the boys.  
  
But it was all over just as quickly as it began, the thunderous noise quieting and the billow of purple clearing away. One by one they were all hit with a massive wave of unbalance, Evie, Ben, Carlos, and Jay falling right off their feet. Only Mal stood unfazed, looking down at the pile of Auradon Kids like they were a puddle she was trying not to step in.  
  
"Everyone in one piece? Yay," she rolled her eyes.  
  
Jay bounded up first, stooping over to take Carlos and Evie by the arm and pull them to their feet as well. Ben got up and swayed unsteadily for a second as he straightened out his suit.  
  
"Are we here?" he wondered.  
  
"Why don't you look?" Mal suggested.  
  
All around them was barren rock and sharp drops, and for the middle of the day, it may as well have been night. The sky above was even darker than it was over Auradon, and there wasn't a single splash of color from grass or flowers to break up the gray of the rock.  
  
"...Nope, not dressed for Bald Mountain," Carlos shivered and stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his shorts.  
  
"Can I interest you in a little fire?" Mal asked pleasantly, slipping the raven feather into the pocket inside her jacket.  
  
Carlos frowned at her.  
  
"...No. Thanks."  
  
They weren't quite at the top, for the summit loomed over them like one lone, sharp tooth, so Mal just turned and led the way up the jagged path.  
  
"...Everyone watch your step," Ben cautioned, not liking how close they were to the mountain's edge.  
  
Jay didn't say it, but to himself he was bitterly thinking  _"More like everyone watch Mal."_  
  
"This is quaint," Mal said, looking around at rock, rock, and more rock. "I could build myself a forbidden fortress up here."  
  
"If this mountaintop isn't already taken, that is," Evie reminded her.  
  
She could feel it. That terrible dark feeling she often got back down in Auradon was just so much stronger up here, among the charcoal clouds churning around them and the absolutely eerie silence that was punctuated only by the sharp whistle of wind.  
  
"I can see why no one's ever made it to the top," Carlos murmured, eyeing the terribly sharp drops and steep edges and trying not to imagine what might've happened to anyone who  _did_  attempt to make the entire trip from base to summit.  
  
Evie's day today was going to be such a hard thing to keep from explaining to Doug. Released the Mistress of All Evil. Teleported. Hiked to the top of Bald Mountain. Par for the course.  
  
"...There's really nothing here," Ben quietly marveled. "No plants, no animals, nothing."  
  
"That's kind of what they mean by 'Bald' Mountain, after all," Mal told him with her snark.  
  
"This place doesn't even look like it belongs in Auradon," when Carlos shivered again, it wasn't entirely because of the mountain air. "It's like...it's like The Isle all over again."  
  
"Good times. Good..." Mal stopped in her tracks, swaying on her feet a little.  
  
And swaying was not a thing one wanted to be doing as high up as they were.  
  
"...Mal?" Evie spoke her name very softly.  
  
Jay was mildly concerned too. If Mal went tumbling off the mountain there'd be no one around to send them back to Auradon Prep.  
  
"I'm fine," Mal said bitingly, holding up a hand in warning when she heard the crunch of gravel as Evie stepped towards her.  
  
She didn't look fine, her balance betraying her and the strangest dazed look passing over her face.  
  
"...Come on, we're almost at the top. Just a little farther," Carlos urged her.  
  
Mal snapped herself out of it with a shake of her head and pushed on up the incline of the path like nothing had happened. Maybe it was the thin mountain air. Maybe it was Mal unexpectedly succumbing to the side effects of her own teleportation spell. But as their feet drew them right upon the summit and the spired peak towered over them, it hit Mal again.  
  
With a sudden cry she clamped her hands over her ears like a sharp shriek only she could hear was piercing the air, swaying unsteadily again before falling heavily to her knees.  
  
"Mal!!"   
  
Ben and Evie both rushed for her, hearts skipping a beat as she dropped dangerously close to the cliff's edge, but Evie reached her first, grabbing her by the shoulders and holding tight to keep her from falling over.  
  
"Mal? What is it??" Evie asked.  
  
Mal squeezed her eyes shut, every one of her senses suddenly going haywire.  
  
Magic.  _Dark_  magic. Flooding around her like a poisonous gas and driving her insane as her magical instincts blared a hundred warning sirens inside her head. In her mind's eye she saw bolts of white-hot lightning dancing across a pitch black sky, heard the mighty cracks of thunder over the ringing in her ears. She saw ghostly and skeletal figures rising from earthen graves, scenes of blazing fires and sickly green smoke consuming nightmarish creatures all while a pair of enormous yellowed eyes watched in amusement along with a horribly fanged grin.  
  
"Mal??"  
  
Evie's voice. It was a wonder Mal could hear it among the chaos in her head and the hands over her ears futilely trying to block it all out.  
  
"...There's something here," Mal said through clenched teeth.  
  
Ben, Carlos, and Jay reflexively shifted into defensive stances, suddenly on high alert like knights ready to charge into battle. But Evie, Evie was the one who truly understood. She understood that Mal was sensing immense and terrible power, not some physical threat about to close in on them that the boys could fight off. And up here, with the summit of Bald Mountain just within their sights, only one thing could be scrambling Mal's senses so very badly.  
  
"Chernabog..." she whispered in dread.  
  
The ancient stone of a mountaintop suddenly unfurling as if it were alive, opening up into two gigantic wings that blotted out the light of a full moon. Those same narrowed, demonic eyes glowing yellow from a horned head, piercing the night. A bird's eye view of Auradon and a massive shadow of pure, inescapable darkness slowly creeping across the land and eclipsing the entire kingdom. Mal saw it all in disorienting flashes from behind closed eyes.  
  
"...Chernabog," she said, echoing Evie.  
  
Speaking the monster's name was like breaking a spell for her, for the nightmarish images ceased, she lowered her hands from her ears, and the flood of dizziness ebbed away to leave only a dull aching in her head. She opened her eyes, slowly, and felt Evie's hands leaving her shoulders.  
  
"...It's real..." Jay murmured emotionlessly, stricken with disbelief.  
  
"And it's here," Mal added, getting to her feet.  
  
"Where??" Carlos spun and looked all around, seeing only dirty gray rock.  
  
Mal pointed, up at the towering summit that was just another climb or two away from them.  
  
"...There. Strange for a volcano to have one lone peak like that, don’t you think? That drawing you guys found doesn't show Chernabog sitting on top of the mountain, Chernabog  _is_  the mountain. Hibernating, remember?"  
  
"...And now it's getting ready to wake up," Evie's wide and terrified eyes looked to Ben, Jay, Carlos, hoping and praying that one of them could say something to alleviate her fear but knowing darn good and well that nothing they could say would calm her down now.  
  
Apocalypse. The end of Auradon and quite possibly the world. Mal had said so herself; she'd run across her fair share of evil prophecies back on The Isle that all pointed to Chernabog as the bringer of the end. And now the end was just around the corner. But as Evie was looking to her friends, her friends were casting that exact same horrified look back at Mal.  
  
"...What can we do?" Ben helplessly asked her.  
  
Terror. Fear. Helplessness. The very things that Mal preyed on. Her encounter with the monstrous energy radiating off of the slumbering Chernabog obviously left her no worse for the wear, for just like good old times a sly grin was creeping across her face like this was all one of her games of cards and she'd just been dealt a very amusing hand.  
  
"Mal, what can we do to stop this??"  
  
A very amusing hand indeed. The king of Auradon and his stuck-up little friends, practically on their knees and begging for help from the Mistress of Evil. What a day. If only her mother could see her now.  
  
"Hang on to your crowns, kids. You're gonna need one heck of a magic ritual."


End file.
